In Your Love is King (1984) she describes quite a different lover, one whose love “touches the very part of me that is making my soul sing. I’m crying out for more. Your love is king…. This is no blind faith. This is no sad and sorry dream. This is no blind faith. Your love is real”. It is not entirely clear whether she is talking about a lover or following a tradition as old as the bible and using passionate love to portay an awareness of Love (cf. Hosea, Song of Songs) or whether she simply enjoys the ambiguity of a song that could be read either way. In 2008, the UK Daily Telegraph listed it as one of the 50 best love songs of the 1980′s.

King of Sorrow from the Lover’s Rock album (2000) explores the determination to continue despite feeling overwhelmed: “I’m crying everyone’s tears and there inside our private war I died the night before… I suppose I could just walk away. Will I disappoint my future if I stay? It’s just a day that brings it all about. Just another day and nothing’s any good. The DJ’s playing the same song, I have so much to do. I have to carry on. I wonder if this grief will ever let me go. I feel like I am the king of sorrow, yeah, the king of sorrow.

Soldier of Love , the title song of Sade’s latest album, is about not giving up on one’s capacity to love even when hurt and pain and confusion make it seem a distant reality:

I’ve lost the use of my heart, but I’m still alive,
Still looking for the life, the endless pool on the other side.
It’s a wild wild west, I’m doing my best,
I’m at the borderline, I’m at the hinterland of my devotion,
In the frontline of this battle of mine, But I’m still alive ….
I know that love will come, turn it all around.
I’m a soldier of love,
Every day and night, all the days of my life.

The Soldier of Love album was released this year (February 8, 2010). This is the first album to be released in 10 years. Despite this gap, Sade still has a loyal fanbase. Sade has chosen to be defiend by her songs rather than a media created public persona. Though she says her most recent album contains “quite a lot of my history“, she is deliberately reticent about the actual details, because she wants people to be focused on the way the song relates to her life and not to limit its meaning to her particular story.

In an interview Sade give to UK’s Sunday Times just before the release of Soldier of Love, we get a glimpse into a small part of Sade’s history. Sade told the Times that her parents loved each other deeply, but could not live together. Sade’s father is Nigerian and her mother British. Sade was born in Nigeria, but four months after Sade was born her mother took Sade and her older brother. The three returned to the UK, leaving her father behind in Nigeria. Periodically Sade’s parents considered getting back together but never did When her parents married, Sade’s father gave her mother a rose. 30 years later when he died, Sade’s mother took the preserved rose and threw it into the grave.  Sade said that point she realized how deeply her mother had cared for her father.  She had held onto the rose all that time. She traces the theme of unfulfilled love in many of her songs to her parents long lasting but never quite realized love.

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The Rape of Africa (David LaChappelle)

Venus and Mars (Sandro Botticelli)

Throughout the month of May, the mural to the left will be hanging in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. The mural, by David LaChappelle is based on Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and is meant to comment on the effects of war, mass marketing, and mining on Africa.

Our society is fond of using rape as a rhetorical device, and when it is used well it can send a powerful message. When artists use rape as a metaphor it is vitally important that they use the metaphor in a way that honors rape victims. This painting fails to do that on several levels.

Africa has real rape victims and all too human victims of war motivated murder and amputation. But in LaChappelle’s vision of the rape of Africa, the human cost of rape and violence make no appearance anywhere in the picture. Standing in for them is a beautiful model who was born in London, has never lived in Africa and has been twice convicted herself for assault, one in London for being verbally abusive to a police officer when she didn’t get her luggage quickly enough and once in New York, for throwing a mobile phone at her maid. There is something deeply troubling about a woman who assaults someone in her employ being used as a model for innocent victims of violence in Africa.

Second, LaChapelle’s mural portrays the aftermath of rape. Real rape survivors want to be honored for their courage as well as their struggle. A painting of the aftermath of rape that fails to portray both loss and courage is incomplete. South African activist Carrie Shelver commenting on the 2006 Zuna rape trial, observes “Characterising the survivor as a “victim” who is weak, frightened and voiceless is equally simplistic and damaging to the struggle for gender equality and the advancement of women’s rights. Survivors can be both in need of protection from the criminal justice system and be courageous at the same time.”

Third, LaChapelle uncritically reflects modern societies constant confusion about the difference between love, sex, and rape.

The ancient world understood how problematic it would be to confuse love and violence and went out of their way to insure that rape stayed far away from Venus. Venus has no shortage of liasons, but all of them are consensual.   Venus is the one of the few females in classical mythology that was never raped.  She even managed to successfully fight off Zeus himself, something no other woman in classical mythology was able to do.  Botticelli’s painting reflects the understanding of the ancient world.  Mars has not taken her, but rather she Mars.  Botticelli’s painting presumes a woman so in control of her sexuality that she can even overcome the God of War. In Botticelli’s painting Venus is full clothed and alert. She looks calmly and determinedly outward. The satyrs mock Mars, one stealing his hat, another blowing in his ear. Mars head is tilted back. He is so beaten he doesn’t give any sign of waking despite the wasps buzzing by his ear.

LaChappelle  manages to do what even Zeus could not: rape Venus.   In doing so he confuses love and rape.  Worse yet, he doesn’t think it even needs an explanation and neither do any of the reviews we’ve been able to find.  This fusion lies at the heart of our societies minimization and rationalization of dating and relationship violence.

Fourth, he robs both rape victims and Africa of a powerful redemptive vision.  Botticelli’s Venus and Mars depicts the power of Love over War.   Love of oneself, love of society, love of vision for a healed world is what helps rape survivors overcome their trauma.  It is also what will one day help Africa heal.   All over Africa, the survivors of its violence and exploitation are transforming and healing what rape, exploitation and violence destroyed. They are using the power of love for the world and their passion for righting wrongs:

• Imam, a supermodel who advocates for African children and AIDS treatment through “I am African” and Keep a Child Alive fled her native Somalia as a child and lived as a refugee in Kenya.
• Waris Dirie, another supermodel who has served as UN ambassador advocating against female genital mutilation. Diree fled Somalia at age 13 because her father tried to sell her in marriage to a 61-year old man for 5 camels.
• Wangari Muta Maathai, Kenyan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in sustainable development. She has been imprisoned many times for her opposition to the government.
• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the current president of Liberia, who lead a peaceful revolution that overthrew Charles Taylor, now accused of war crimes. Her opposition to former Liberian presidents, has forced to flee her country during purges, exiled her in lieu of 10 year imprisonment and placed under house arrest.
• Betty Makoni, a Zimbabwean rape survivor who founded Girl Child Network to educate and empower young girls, hoping to build a new generation of strength in Africa.
• Lumo Sinai, a young Congoleese woman who allowed her story of rape and fistula repair to be featured in a documentary to publicize rape and violence in the Congo and the work of Heal Africa where she received treatment.
• Masika Katsuva who watched her husband murdered, her daughters raped, and was herself raped. She now runs a shelter for housing rape survivors who have no place to go after they have been rejected from their own communities.
• Olive Lembe Kabila, wife of the president of the DRC who has lend her name and political connections to fight rape and maternal deaths.
• Charlene Smith and Alison Botha, South African rape survivors who actively campaign against rape.

Chapelle is not interested in portraying the redemptive power and courage of rape survivors. He only wants to show destruction and dominance. How ironic that in a painting meant to raise awareness and change destructive patterns, he portrays rape not through the eyes of victims, but through the eyes of rapists.

It is bad enough that Africa has suffered from exploitation. Do we have to poor salt in the wound by making Africa appear eternally and hopelessly victimized? Fundamentally this is a patronizing message because if Africa is so helpless, then only a patron or third party can help her. This violates everything social activists have learned about the importance of self-empowerment in overcoming subjugation and marginalization.

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Slobodan Milosevic

Idi Amin

Saadam Hussein

Chairman Mao

Augusto Pinochet

Joseph Stalin

Adolf Hitler

The photographs to the left are part of a photo essay titled “Potency” by Nina Maria Kleivan. Its intent is to question how innocent children become pinicles of evil. The photographer is the daughter of a a member of the Norweigian WWII resistance who eventually was captured and placed in a German concentration camp. As a child her anger at what her father suffered was so intense that she carried around the name of one of her father’s prison guards in hopes of one day killing him. As a new mother she was struck by the innocence of children and then by the seeming innocence of dictators. “When all you see is a picture, Stalin could’ve been anyone’s kind grandfather. You can’t see the millions of people on his conscience or what a paranoid, dreadful human being he was.” she tells HaAretz.

Evil doesn’t always “look evil”. We come to associate the dress of Hilter or Mussilini or Idi Amin or Sadaam Huessein with evil because of a life long chain of choices. Those choices lead to personal actions and even world events that define a person. The actions and their outcomes, not the clothes make a dictator or a rapist.

Yet when we as a society finally acknowledge evil, we tend to look at the outside. The characteristic dress of the perpetrator becomes the symbol of evil and the process by which evil comes to be is lost. We forget that any of us, making the a certain chain of choices in a certain social context could be perpetrators of evil. In Klevian’s words to HaAretz:

We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil. You need to be conscious that your actions have consequences that impact on your fellow human beings. The people I let my daughter portray didn’t give a damn about the human cost, the casualties, their thoughts caused. The responsibility is yours alone. You can’t throw it away – as a parent, as human beings – and say that you just followed orders.

Klevian raises important questions: where does evil come from? How does innocence become a symbol of evil? Unfortunately, much of the on-line debate has centered on whether a mother should or should not dress her child up in the clothes of dictators. When all one sees is a picture of a baby, it appears that all one sees is the baby. The child succeeds as a symbol of innocence, but fails as a symbol of choice.

We lose the tension between the grandfatherly picture of Stalin and the mass graves of the Stalinist purges carried out on his direct command. The clothes of an adult Hilter or Milosevic represent their choices because adults are actors in control of their life. Infants do not choose their clothes. At best their clothes represent the choices of their parents and the influence those parents will eventually have over the child’s life.

So is this an essay on the role of a parent in shaping a child’s moral identity? No, because at some point children become adults. They become moral agents in their own right and responsible for their own choices. The evil that so apalls us is the product of adult choices. Evil parents don’t always raise evil kids. In fact, childhood experiences of evil can bring out the best in human beings rather than the worst.

Dressing the child in the clothes of despot also fails as a symbol of the danger of following commands. Childhood in fact represents the one stage in life where following commands may lead to more rather than less morality. Most of society sees a child’s ability to follow commands as an essential step in moral training and development. How many times does a child share food or toys because their mother or father insisted that they do? Some children are naturally generous and outgoing. Others need to be encouraged.

Furthermore, the despots portrayed in Klevian’s photos were the ones who issued the commands. They were in full control of their moral agency and chose to use it to draw lines between friend and foe. All who supported them lived. All who opposed them were candidates for death. Of course they looked like kindly grandfathers. To the people they saw as friends, they were.

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